Interest in the use of carbon nanotubes (“CNTs”) in engineering applications continues to increase. CNTs are tubes of graphite typically grown from iron nanoparticles or iron, and can be categorized as single-walled nano-tubes (“SWNTs”) or multi-walled nanotubes (“MWNTs”). CNTs have many interesting properties, including exhibiting the highest tensile strength and elastic modulus of any known material.
While the behavior of CNTs has been widely studied, the use of CNTs as structural components has proved problematic due to a variety of issues, including the difficulty of manipulating individual CNTs, the difficulty of incorporating CNTs into other structures, and the inherently fragile nature CNTs.